As part of the **Clear Creek Education Foundation** Grant I was awarded this year, we have studied and watched ants create an amazing tunnel system in their gel habitat. An additional part of that grant was to hatch praying mantis to see their life cycle and compare it to the ants and other animals we have studied this year.
The first thing we received several weeks ago was an unusal looking egg sac. We had to hang it from a stick inside the habitat. According to the directions, within 2-3 weeks, mantis nymphs would hatch.
We are going to research them so we can post the information here so we can share our new found knowledge about these creatures.
Welll look what occured on May 6th!
Look at them all! There are around 100 of them.
To understand how small the nymphs are, look at this one compared to an adult I found last summer.
The nymph is that small beige spec in the petri dish on the right.
Today as the kids were watching, more nymphs hatched! They came out this beige color and had really dark compound eyes. Within hours after coming out of the egg sac, they turned darker brown and their eyes lightened and were not in as much contrast to their bodies.
Here are some up close and personal pictures of the newly hatched mantids that we took with our new and exciting digital microscope we also got through our grant from the foundation.
Here is one of our students compared to the nymph while we were observing it with our microscope. Pretty awesome!
Here are the pictures of our 4th grade buddies who came down to help us research some information about the mantids. We were all very excited!
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Mr. Magdos caught some fruit flies and we fed them to the mantids. We were able to watch the mantid eat through our microscope. Check out these pictures!!!
Here you can see the mantid holding the fruit fly in it's front legs.
Praying Mantis
As part of the **Clear Creek Education Foundation** Grant I was awarded this year, we have studied and watched ants create an amazing tunnel system in their gel habitat. An additional part of that grant was to hatch praying mantis to see their life cycle and compare it to the ants and other animals we have studied this year.
The first thing we received several weeks ago was an unusal looking egg sac. We had to hang it from a stick inside the habitat. According to the directions, within 2-3 weeks, mantis nymphs would hatch.
We are going to research them so we can post the information here so we can share our new found knowledge about these creatures.
Welll look what occured on May 6th!
Look at them all! There are around 100 of them.
To understand how small the nymphs are, look at this one compared to an adult I found last summer.
The nymph is that small beige spec in the petri dish on the right.
Today as the kids were watching, more nymphs hatched! They came out this beige color and had really dark compound eyes. Within hours after coming out of the egg sac, they turned darker brown and their eyes lightened and were not in as much contrast to their bodies.
Here are some up close and personal pictures of the newly hatched mantids that we took with our new and exciting digital microscope we also got through our grant from the foundation.
Here is one of our students compared to the nymph while we were observing it with our microscope. Pretty awesome!
Here are the pictures of our 4th grade buddies who came down to help us research some information about the mantids. We were all very excited!
[ invalid file: mantid_research.wmv ]Mr. Magdos caught some fruit flies and we fed them to the mantids. We were able to watch the mantid eat through our microscope. Check out these pictures!!!
Here you can see the mantid holding the fruit fly in it's front legs.